Maybe Chicago should ban bikes for a day

Ron Grossman is sick of bicyclists menacing pedestrians. He wants Chicago to ban bicycles for a day.

I can't be the only pedestrian hoping for an early snowfall after months of dodging bicycles, Chicago's version of the running of the bulls at Pamplona.

It's an increasingly popular sport, at least with the city's cyclists. It offers the cachet of paying respect to the environment while keeping physically fit. Bicycles don't pollute. Pedaling is good for the cardiovascular system. There is even a small health benefit to walkers. Nothing gets the juices flowing like crossing a street and seeing a two-wheeled vehicle homing in on you like a heat-seeking missile.

That happened to me while crossing Lincoln Avenue this summer. I had a green light, and while conscious of a bicyclist coming down Lincoln, I assumed she would stop for the red light she was facing, or at least slow down. But she kept on coming, and I hate to think of the resulting damage to her bike and my body had I not jumped out of the way. Without so much as looking back over her shoulder, she flipped me the bird. I guess she thought that, even though I had a "walk" light, I should have deferred to her right to go through a red light unimpeded.

That sense of entitlement has been given a municipal stamp of approval, at least to judge from a sidewalk sign at the northwest corner of Dearborn and Randolph streets: "LOOK!" it reads, with a stick figure bicyclist perched between the two O's. "BE SAFE BE ALERT," it cautions, a message carrying the imprimatur of "CDOT," the Chicago Department of Transportation. The warning is repeated just off the curb, where the pedestrian-crossing lane intersects a bicycle lane: "LOOK BIKES."

Logically, a more appropriate warning sign would face the flow of bicycle traffic, reminding bicyclists that they have an obligation to obey the law.

In effect, the CDOT warning signs for pedestrians are disclaimers. To my eye, they are the city's way of saying to its non-cycling citizens: "You are on your own. Don't look to us to protect you by enforcing the traffic laws." It spells out what long has been going on. Think about it: When is the last time you saw a cop write a ticket for a bicyclist who failed to heed a red light or a stop sign? I never have, despite living just around the corner from Wells Street in Old Town. Sitting on my deck, I see dozens and dozens of bicyclists blowing through the stop sign all day long. At rush hours, all the spinning spokes and chains blend into a virtual scofflaw cloud.

I took the CDOT sign as a personal affront. I've long derived an enormous pleasure in walking the city's streets. As a pre-adolescent I made the wondrous discovery that just the other side of a railroad viaduct or across a major thoroughfare there was another neighborhood — in some ways different from mine, in other aspects comfortingly familiar. Collectively, all those nuances of neighborhood cultures make up a street-level kaleidoscope matched by few other cities.

But it's hard to enjoy when you have to be prepared to evade a bicycle with a quick move worthy of a toreador.

I take some solace from having a second home alongside a lake in a small town, where the wife and I walk along the shore. It's as peaceful as Thoreau's Walden Pond. Yet something is missing. There is no sidewalk. Having concrete under foot is part of my comfort zone. Also, the air is too pure. There are no Chicago smells: onions on a greasy spoon grill; the pungent smoke of a rib joint; a perfume of spices wafting out of an Indian grocery.

Would that I might again walk Chicago streets enveloped in those aromas — without keeping an eye out for bicyclists riding like competitors in the Tour de France. It's not an impossible wish. Cyclists ride civilly elsewhere. The Dutch ride slowly and stately. I've seen New York's police pull over cyclists for weaving dangerously through slow-moving automobile traffic. Why can't our cops do the same? Holding our cyclists to the rules of the road could be a bonanza for city coffers.

Chicago has given cyclists 230 miles of bike lanes and provides rental bicycles at rock-bottom prices. Lake Shore Drive is annually closed to cars so bikers can have it all to themselves for a few hours. Why not give pedestrians a similar holiday by periodically closing the streets to bicycles? Maybe not all of them. But arteries like Milwaukee Avenue, Halsted Street and Devon Avenue that knife through the city's patchwork quilt of ethnic communities.

Streets where walkers can eavesdrop on immigrants gossiping in languages transplanted from dozens of Old World homelands and hear English flavored with an Irish lilt, a Yiddish singsong, or the rolling cadences of the rural South — a joy to the ears, especially if the eyes need not keep watch for approaching bicyclists.

A day without bicyclists on the road could be a boon not just to pedestrians. It also might tempt some riders to walk streets that, perched on bicycle seat, they see as little more than a blur. Strolling down those same blocks, they might just realize that Chicago is like a fine wine: Its streets offer a rare treat that should be leisurely tasted, not rushed through, nonstop.